


still wrap me up

by okaynowkiss



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Celebrity, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Musicians, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bottom Steve Rogers, Break Up, M/M, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Minor Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Nonmonogamous Relationship, Top Bucky Barnes, basically equal parts angst and romcom, brief Steve Rogers/Sharon Carter - Freeform, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:34:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2347040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynowkiss/pseuds/okaynowkiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two people who love each other as much as they do will find a way to make it work. Right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Song-based AU set to the tune of [Banks's "Waiting Game"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaI5JCxOCdw) — so listen to that for maximum vibes.
> 
> It's now divided into two chapters, so if you wanted to you could read just the first one and it would be a complete story that doesn't end on the happiest note.

**+**

 

 **Steve Rogers, 1:22 PM: Hey I have a free day Sunday, do you want to fly in? I miss you**  

They’re outside at a café on Rhinower Straße in Berlin, nursing cups of coffee, bundled up and wearing sunglasses, when Bucky gets the text message. He hasn’t talked to Steve in at least a week, and hasn’t seen him since the regrettable episode in Brooklyn a month ago. The name on his cell phone screen alone tugs at his heart. He buys the plane tickets on his phone over the café’s wifi without glancing up at Natasha or Clint.

“Don’t touch me,” Natasha says, across the table, sitting up ramrod straight with her hands tucked under her arms for warmth, dark glasses hiding half of her face, her lips pressed tight.

Clint, hunched forward over a plate of pastry crumbs, hair pointing in every direction, doesn’t look back at her. “Don’t touch _me_ , _you_ kicked me.”

“Children,” Bucky says, like he’s about to address them, but then just stops. He’s not feeling great either. They’re sitting out in the 40 degree weather (Bucky is never going to learn Celsius, no matter how many European tours he goes on, he’s just not going to do it) because as a group, they believe that cold air is a hangover cure, despite years of a lack of proof of this. It’s sort of good for a pounding head, at least. Like an ice pack.

“Never touch me again,” Natasha says to no one in particular. Bucky likes her when she’s hungover. She’s always funny, but when she’s not feeling well she allows her jokes to take on a dramatic tinge that she would usually find distasteful.

She and Clint have been dating the entire time Bucky has known them, and at this point he just finds their bickering comforting. They spend so much time alone, just the three of them. (The band’s called Assassin: an old joke about their shared past from before Bucky joined the group. He’s always felt it was fitting, though.) They’re his bandmates, but they’re also, outside of Steve, certainly the best friends Bucky’s ever had.

“Listen, I’m going to leave for a couple days,” Bucky tells them. “I’ll come back Tuesday morning.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows high enough that Bucky can see them over the tops of her sunglasses, but she doesn’t move otherwise. The sunlight catches strands of her hair and lights them up, burning red.

Clint glances at her, then looks back down at his plate. “Okay,” he tells Bucky. “We have to set up at six, I think.”

“Yep,” Bucky agrees. He checked their calendar before buying the tickets. He’s not, like, wildly irresponsible. He feels bad about missing the days off with them, because they’ve been busy and they were all looking forward to the break. The three of them got an early start on it last night though, so he’s not going to feel _too_ bad about it.

“Any other information you want to share with the group?” Natasha asks.

“Steve wants to... get together? I don’t know.” Bucky looks off down the street. An orange cat darts across the sidewalk and into an alley a block away. “I want to make sure things are good with him before we’re in the studio next month, you know?”

Under the table, Natasha rests the toe of her shoe on top of Bucky’s boot. “I know,” she says.

 

+

 

The album’s called _SHIELD_ , which Bucky thinks is a questionable choice, but which doesn’t even crack the top five bad names of albums that either of them have released, so it’s whatever. Maybe he can talk Steve into changing it before it comes out anyway.

It’s been awhile since he could talk Steve into anything, but.

Steve sent Bucky the new songs a week ago. His band, Circuit Theory, is due to release the album at the end of the month, but he’s always shown everything to Bucky before showing it to the world, and Bucky’s always done the same. Not for feedback, although once upon a time they would’ve done that, too. Just because they’re special to each other.

Bucky slides noise-canceling headphones over his ears and queues it up on his phone, and definitely, totally intends to listen to it, but it’s three AM and he’s thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic (maybe?) and it’s dark in the plane’s cabin (and sure, he took a sleeping pill an hour ago and it hasn’t kicked in and maybe isn’t going to kick in, at this point) and once the cheerful keyboard chimes in he has to turn the song off immediately. Steve’s definitely going to ask him what he thought of the tracks, but he just can’t.

The last time he saw Steve was almost a month ago, back in Brooklyn. It was ugly, even for them. Steve was mysteriously fucking pissed about him signing to Mercury, and he’d been doubly mad when Bucky had blown off a medium important interview to fly in and see him and try to get Steve to see reason about the Mercury thing.

(Not that he’d blown off the interview. This was an important point in arguments with five separate people and two corporations, and Bucky really needed to stick to his guns about that one. The interview was... rescheduled. To a time as yet to be determined, a month later. [He probably shouldn’t have blown that off. Natasha had been furious, which was way scarier than Steve, although less emotionally devastating for Bucky, so he did tend to choose that when given the option.])

So they’d fought. It was... typical stuff.

( _Bucky: “My career’s never going to be good enough for you.”_

_Steve: “I don’t care about your career, I care about you. And it just seems crazy that you would make this deal without even telling me, when it’s something you’re always sworn you were never going to do.”_

_Bucky: “What, signing to a major label? I said that when we were eighteen, and no label, of any kind, would’ve looked at me twice.”_

_Steve: “So why would you blow off that interview to come here?”_

_Bucky: “Because you were so angry on the phone about it! I just want to fix things with us.”_

_Steve: “Then you can’t use me as an excuse to sabotage yourself!”_

_Bucky: “Are you disappointed in me for wanting to be successful or for failing? Could you just pick one and focus on it for awhile? This is exhausting.”_

_Steve: “I’m so sick of fighting with you all the time.”_

Etc. Boring.)

And they’d barely talked since. They seemed to both be treading lightly, wary of fighting again and wanting to keep things pleasant. As used to it as he was, it did still get under Bucky’s skin. All he ever really wanted to do was fall asleep at night with his head on Steve’s shoulder. Bucky loves playing music, and loves his bandmates, but so often his only comfort is thinking of the way Steve looks at him.

So when he got the text from Steve in Berlin, it felt like an opportunity. It felt like maybe they were on the same page for once. They usually have to plan their visits so far in advance, against both bands’ schedules. (They’re not always on the road, of course. For a few months a year, which they do their best to match up, they’re home in Brooklyn. Those times are charmed, full of sunlight in Bucky’s memory. Often the untroubled happiness of those months is what sustains their relationship through the rest of the year.) So Steve asking him to show up was important.

And yet, he can’t bring himself to listen to Steve’s songs. He doesn’t want to hear Circuit Theory, although their songs are always fun and catchy. The band consists of Steve singing with a little blonde ball of energy named Pepper, Pepper’s husband Tony behind the drum set, and depending on the song as many as five other musicians on various guitars, keyboards, and horns.

He hasn’t heard the album yet but he knows the songs will be familiar, warm, and inviting, like all Steve’s music. But he doesn’t want to _hear_ Steve, the same Steve that everyone who listens to the album will hear. He wants Steve to be next to him on this dumb plane, a strong arm around his shoulder. But he isn’t. A stranger wearing a corduroy jacket and snoring lightly is in the next seat over.

And Bucky is literally flying _to see Steve_ at this very moment and will be there _within hours_ , but he hasn’t let himself really get sad about missing him at all in the past month, since Assassin has been having a good time on tour, and he disconnects his headphones and turns them off and shoves them back into his bag, and presses himself against his seat back and turns to the closed window and _cries_ , suddenly, without noise, his face hot with it.

It’s just that it seems very important, and urgent, that they make up for good. Like really make up, not like all the times they’ve just sort of agreed to put aside whatever was wrong because they don’t get to spend very much time together and it always seems silly to waste it by fighting. Because it’s starting to feel, if he’s honest, dangerous. The more work there is, the more chances there are to be apart. And with Assassin now on a label with real fuck-you money to throw at promoting an album, there’s going to be an overwhelming amount of press for them to do. (So like, the amount Steve and Circuit Theory have been doing for years now.)

Also, Bucky knows the new album is the best thing he’s ever worked on by about a hundred miles (and it’s not like he hasn’t been proud of lots of his stuff, including the early work with Steve). It feels like the beginning of the real thing for him, for Assassin. And when they lock themselves in the studio next month, he has to be there mentally 100%. He owes Clint and Natasha that. (He owes them way more than that, but he’s going to give them that.)

So Bucky has to try to be better to Steve. The thought of losing him is... unthinkable. Like it’s actually unthinkable, like Bucky doesn’t really think of it. They have loads of _problems_ and they haven’t so much been dating for nine years as they have been dating for four years and then going off-again-on-again for five years. But they both still count their anniversary the same as it ever was, the date they first kissed blushing and smiling and sixteen, because neither of them (and whatever issues they have Bucky will say this confidently about Steve) has ever really considered ending up with anyone else.

 

+

 

He feels like a zombie as dawn breaks over the city and he waits in line for a cab. No one recognizes him, because it’s ungodly early and there aren’t that many people around, and also because people aren’t really used to the long hair yet. He never knows if that’s mostly why he’s grown it or not mostly why.

Steve seemed to like it, the last few times he saw it, in the sweet way that he always likes everything Bucky does. (In Brooklyn a month ago, he’d said it suited Bucky, and he’d also twisted a hand in it while Bucky sucked him off.) He’s so—if Steve would be jealous, Bucky would—just, he’d give a lot to be on more even footing with Steve, who might get angry but is always kind.

Bucky has a temper and regrets half the things he says. It’s not really a fair fight.

He slides into a cab at 6:34 AM, solitary bag pulled into the seat with him, gives the driver the name of the hotel, and promptly falls back asleep, head on top of his crossed arms, resting on his bag.

He wakes up a few minutes later—the sleeping pill is still knocking him out but he’s so anxious at the same time. He always feels mildly sick, driving to meet him, like...

Like Steve won’t be there when he shows up. Or like he’ll show up and Steve will be dead. Or Steve will throw him out as soon as he gets there.

And all of that is so beyond irrational. Steve’s stood him up a few times over the years, but not intentionally, and Bucky’s done way worse to him. They’re both—

They both—try. Typically.

And Steve hasn’t been seriously sick since they were small children, a part of his life (their lives) so far in the past that no magazine profile Bucky’s aware of has even reported it.

As far as Steve throwing him out, that one was a toss-up on even the best day. They fought viciously half the time they were together: screaming arguments confined neither indoors nor to any one metropolitan area, a practice conveniently documented in the pages of various print and online publications, often under headlines that used phrases like “troubled rockstar” about one of them or the other. It was Bucky who usually got the worst of it, although once he and Steve were on good terms again they tended to agree that they were equally at fault, and that the magazines were penalizing Bucky for not looking quite as all-American and acting quite as _aw, shucks_ as Steve.

Not that it was that often, the fighting... Sometimes they were photographed having picnics in the park and volunteering at Children’s Hospital and whatever. It was just that those events were typically staged, at the behest of Steve’s manager, whereas the shouted _“So what the fuck do you want me to do!?”_ outside a nightclub (etc.) was depressingly real.

(There was audio of the nightclub thing floating around on the internet, courtesy of an industrious security guard, to which Bucky had never listened, although he’d had it described to him in gory detail by a publicist. Bucky was the one yelling.)

And of course, the thing with all the paparazzi troubles was, Steve was considerably more famous than Bucky. If anything, it helped Bucky’s stupid career, to be involved in this high profile gossip. Meanwhile it certainly wasn’t good for Steve, who had a nice-guy image to maintain, for the sake of his basically family-friendly band. (And also because he was a nice guy.) He never made a big deal out of it to Bucky, though, rolling his eyes whenever the subject came up and seeming slightly amused when talking about his manager blowing whatever it was out of proportion.

So Bucky has more than enough reason to want nothing to do with celebrity news. Still, there’s a discarded issue of yesterday’s _Us Weekly_ on the floor of the cab. And at the moment he’ll take any distraction from his nerves.

 

+

 

It’s barely seven when Bucky lets himself into the hotel room (overly modern and trendy). A guitar case stands against the couch: the old Les Paul that Bucky was always jealous of, even once he could afford his own.

Steve is an early riser by nature, was even when they were teenagers, but these days he’s up so late for shows and their accompanying parties that he tends to sleep until midday.

Sure enough, Bucky finds him curled up in bed, a comforter covering about half of him. He’s still wearing yesterday’s jeans and t-shirt, but he looks undeniably sweet like this, hair sticking up softly in all directions. He looks younger in sleep, smaller, more like he looked when they were teenagers playing songs in their parents’ apartments. Before he was covering magazines, smiling and blonde and wholesome, before his denim-clad image was plastered in subway car advertisements for whichever latest album it was. Before he and Pepper charmed the crowd on _Saturday Night Live_ for the third time, looking like nothing so much as Abercrombie models. Steve has always, despite whatever snarky thing Bucky might think about him to make himself feel better, been so blindingly beautiful that Bucky will sometimes _blush_ at a smiling picture of him. No wonder the world’s obsessed with him.

It’s better that he’s asleep. Bucky drops his stuff quietly and sits down at the desk chair to untie his boots. He’ll crawl into bed next to Steve and maybe when they both wake up, Bucky won’t want to kill him anymore.

(This is the constant tension between them, for Bucky at least: he wants Steve to hold him and tell him everything’s going to be okay, but the thing Bucky is upset about is always, always, always Steve.)

He’s kicked off his boots and is kneeling on the bed, pulling back the comforter, when Steve blinks awake and smiles at him.

Of course.

“Hey,” Steve says, or tries to — his voice isn’t there yet.

“Hi,” Bucky answers, and can’t look away from him.

Steve hasn’t moved to sit up, in fact he stretches an arm around Bucky and cuddles up to him, encouraging him to lie down. “Flight okay?” he asks.

“Was fine,” Bucky agrees, although he can’t remember any of it, including the part where he cried. “Is fucking your manager going okay?”

He doesn’t mean to say it. He also knew he would say it, first chance he got, and was hoping he wouldn’t have the chance until later.

Steve blinks at him some more, and his frown wrinkles his forehead. “Um.”

Bucky goes and grabs the _Us Weekly_ from his bag and tosses it next to Steve on the bed.

“Ah,” Steve says, sitting up and glancing at it but not picking it up. Surely he’s already seen the story, the pictures: her blonde hair obscuring his face in the back of a car; the two of them leaning heavily on one another as they disappear into a hotel. “Sharon’s not actually our manager anymore, but.” He clears his throat—his voice is still weak with how early it is—and drinks from a water bottle on the nightstand.

“Why’d you even invite me here?” Bucky asks. His voice is so embarrassingly shaky that he has to go look out the window. The morning is dramatic orange and pink in the LA smog, sunlight glinting off cars and building glass.

The sound of covers moving and Steve shifting his legs over the side of the bed. “’Cause I wanted to see you. Why’d you come?”

“Because I thought...” Bucky watches the cars driving past twelve stories below, the bus stopping and discharging passengers, the people crossing the road. “I dunno,” he says to the window. “I was happy you asked me. I know we weren’t talking much, but I thought things were good between us, after we talked a month ago. And I wanted to... make sure we were both happy, and everything, because we’re going to record in a couple weeks and you know what it’s like.”

“A month ago. Things were fine,” Steve says gently, “but we broke up.”

Bucky turns back around to gape at him, hands thrown up in question. “In Brooklyn? You thought we broke up? I thought we worked things out.”

“I dunno, Buck,” Steve says and rests his forehead in his hands for a moment. When he looks back up he’s smiling wryly and his eyes are sad. “We fought the whole time. You said let’s not talk for awhile. We both said ‘I can’t do this anymore’ a lot.”

“Well, yeah,” Bucky agrees. “I was tired of fighting with you.”

The truth is that Steve can’t really be blamed, because they break up about five times a year. They also sleep with other people sometimes even when they’re not broken up, the result of certain compromises made that first year Bucky was away on tour and Steve wasn’t. But for whatever reason, the thing with Sharon Carter rankles—it’s so clichéd and irresponsible, and if Steve isn’t going to be serious about Bucky he could at least be serious about his career.

Wasn’t that the deal, to the extent that there was a deal?

Steve is watching him from the bed, tired and sad, and Bucky’s anger leaks out of him. Without it he just feels wrung out. Who is he to judge Steve’s career choices? Circuit Theory won two VMAs last year. Bucky turns back to the window.

 

+

 

The whole thing, playing music and being in love, started out so happy. It started out being the nicest part of Bucky’s life, really. They were kids, teenagers. Steve taught him to play guitar in his parents’ brownstone, and they formed the first of many bands there. By their junior year in college, they’d been playing seriously as The Commandos for three years and had released as many records, two EPs and the most recent an LP on a real label. A tiny label, but a real label. They toured in bursts of ten-night runs along the East Coast whenever they had time; they sold out nightclubs and booked small stages at festivals; they were getting positive little write-ups in _Paste_ and on Pitchfork; and they gave zero serious thought to their future either as a couple or a band, because it was all coming pretty easy and why complicate things?

And then their drummer got sick. And it was easy to take a break, put the band on hold—it wasn’t a big deal at all. Steve and Bucky would still write songs in the evenings, at home in the Brooklyn apartment they shared, they just wouldn’t do anything with them. They were very young. They focused on school for awhile; they hung out with the friends they hadn’t had time for in the past couple years; they talked about where they’d live after they graduated next spring.

When Clint and Natasha asked Bucky to play a few local shows with them, to fill in on lead guitar for their band Assassin, he did it happily and with little thought. He’d always been low-key jealous of their sound anyway, the way he felt about every band he really liked. And it happened quickly, after that, the separation. Bucky remembers it as maybe one conversation with Steve. Telling him, guiltily, “I like it, I like playing with them, but—”

And Steve saying kindly, “I know, idiot. So go do it.” How could either of them have turned it down? It was a proper tour, opening for a band that everyone had heard of, at 36 venues across the country and 12 in Europe.

That was the summer after junior year, and it became clear in September that Bucky wasn’t going to return to school. He was going to record Assassin’s next album with them and tour to support it. Steve fought him bitterly on this point, himself still grudgingly enrolled and now living on a friend’s couch after giving up the studio he and Bucky had shared. Steve’s arguments about academic responsibility weren’t especially convincing, probably because they both knew that Steve would’ve done the same in Bucky’s place, with Bucky or on his own. It was their dream. It was a dream they’d had together at first, but if they couldn’t have it together right now, were they obliged to not want it on their own?

And in Steve’s place, Bucky probably wouldn’t have been so nice about it. Would’ve made Steve feel terrible for leaving him behind. But it was Steve and he didn’t guilt Bucky out of it, because he was a nice person and they loved each other an awful lot. Bucky came close to guilting _himself_ out of it, over and over again. Still, to this day, five years later, he wonders if he should give it up.

As it turned out, it was good Steve went to those last semesters of college, because he met Pepper and Tony in a the back of an intro psych class he was taking just for the credits, having fulfilled his art major already. When he and Bucky played together, Bucky sang back-up vocals on a few tracks, but for the most part it was just Steve fronting the band, even though Bucky wrote most of the music and played lead guitar. But when Steve played with Circuit Theory, he and Pepper sang harmonies, or sometimes elaborate call and response, and maybe the songs weren’t quite up to the same technical level as anything The Commandos slaved over (to say nothing of Assassin, whose albums were regularly reviewed with phrases like “the second coming of seriously crafted garage rock”), but there was a magic to them.

It was a magic that the world took note of, as it turned out... especially after the Prius commercial. And after only a couple of years, they were selling out arenas and the new single was platinum, and Bucky was still opening for acts that weren’t as famous as Steve’s band. But how could he be mad about it? He was the one who left first, and Steve was always going to deserve everything he got. Besides, Assassin always made the more thoughtful publications’ year-end best-of lists, and it wasn’t like Bucky couldn’t have written more commercial music if he’d wanted to. If he was a little bitter, it was at the world, not at Steve.

 

+

 

Steve watches him from the bed for a long time. “Sorry,” he says, eventually, in a small voice. He crosses the room to Bucky and hugs Bucky from behind, pinning Bucky’s arms to his side and tucking his head down against Bucky’s shoulder. It’s a sweet and childish gesture, like he might’ve done when they were kids. (When they were friends.)

“You don’t want me to sleep with other people?” Steve says against Bucky’s shirt, hopeful. Like he thinks it would be sweet if Bucky would like him to be 100% faithful.

Maybe it would be, but it would also be hypocritical and unrealistic. In any case, Bucky can’t stop the helpless laugh that escapes him. “What _other_ people? You’re barely sleeping with me.”

Steve loosens his grip and lets Bucky turn around in his arms. “Not by choice,” Steve says.

Bucky grabs a handful of Steve’s shirt and looks him in the eyes. Steve’s cheeks are flushed from sleeping clothed in the warm hotel room and he’s got a day-old five o’clock shadow. He looks soft and golden and Bucky loves him more than he’s ever loved anything.

With a frustrated sound in his throat, Bucky pulls Steve in and hugs him tightly. “Missed you—”

Steve crushes Bucky to him, one hand around his waist and one in his hair. “You, too, Buck—I’m sorry, I—”

“It doesn’t matter—” Bucky pulls back enough to press his forehead against Steve’s— “I was being a dick. Just, fuck it—forget it, I don’t know why I was mad.”

“I’ve still never loved anybody else,” Steve says, and Bucky knows that it’s true and doesn’t know why it doesn’t matter.

Bucky has never loved anyone else, either. He’s never had a meaningful romantic relationship with anyone but Steve, and he’s never wanted to. He still doesn’t want to. But he does want something he isn’t getting.

It isn’t fair that things with Steve have gotten worse as things with the band go better and better, because it makes it seem like it’s a simple choice Bucky is making: screwing things up with Steve for the sake of the music. But it’s never been that easy.

(Here is what Bucky remembers as the beginning of his musical career. They were seventeen on a chilly fall night, lying on the roof of Bucky’s parents’ apartment building. It was Brooklyn so you couldn’t see the stars, but planes would pass overhead, distant specks of light, and they were happy to count them, cuddled under a blanket [which Bucky would, the next day, get in trouble for accidentally staining with roofing tar]. Steve had rolled over onto his stomach, propped up on his forearms and looking down fondly at Bucky. “I can see it,” he’d told Bucky. “I can see you being like, a famous rockstar. I mean it.” He _had_ meant it, and if he hadn’t, Bucky wouldn’t have ever started to believe it himself.)

They should talk it out, but...

They’re breathing next to each other and Bucky can already tell what Steve’s going to taste like when they kiss. He’s drunk with it immediately, already utterly forgetting what it feels like to be angry or sad about Steve, because under all of that is only ever this—

Everything else falls away when they’re together.

A dark stage before the lights come up, the thrill of a waiting crowd, the electricity and divine ear-splitting rightness of playing with Natasha and Clint when they’re in perfect sync on stage—

It’s all a poor substitute for this, when Steve inhales sharply and finally kisses him. He turns them and throws Bucky onto the bed, pressing him down and tangling their bodies together. They roll over until they’re next to one another, legs slotted together, and Bucky finds the warm skin of Steve’s stomach and chest with his palm. “God,” he breathes against Steve’s lips.

Steve reels him in again and tongues his way into Bucky’s mouth, then moves to scrape his teeth over the curve of Bucky’s neck and suck on the fragile skin there. He rolls them back over so he’s straddling Bucky. “Come on,” Bucky says, impatient, and pushes Steve up to a sitting position, where he follows, so he can strip Steve’s shirt off.

“Oh, okay,” Steve smiles at him, half-naked. “Go on.” He undoes his own belt buckle and zipper while eyeing Bucky’s shirt to get him to lose that to. Bucky tosses it over the side of the bed, and then pulls Steve’s face back to his with a hand on his cheek. They kiss while sitting up this time, slowly and thoroughly, Steve in Bucky’s lap, and their bodies begin to move together too. Bucky grabs him, hard, hand down the back of Steve’s jeans, and pulls them together tightly. “God, please,” he says, zero thoughts in his head, zero control over his own mouth.

Steve twists off of him and flops down next to him so he can shove his pants and underwear off, Bucky racing him to do the same and then crawling over him. He gets a hand between Steve’s legs, cupping him, the skin of Steve’s cock pulled smooth and tight over his erection. Steve sighs into his mouth and then Bucky bites his bottom lip once and moves down the bed to take Steve into his mouth.

He leaves a hand territorially on Steve’s chest, and presses one against his hipbone.

(Bucky’s gotten skinnier over the Assassin years, all the hollows in his body deepened, cheek- and collarbones thrown into relief. The late nights and the drugs and the not eating regular meals have carved him out to his essential parts. Steve, though, changed in the opposite direction—he filled out when they were in college and he’s kept those broad shoulders, the miles of hard golden skin. He dresses it down on stage, oversized flannel shirts with rolled up sleeves being something of an American Aesthetic™ for Circuit Theory [Pepper often wears cut-offs on stage, in fact, which, you’d be kicked out of Assassin before you could say “skinny jeans policy”], but when you see Steve like this it’s hard to imagine he’s not a working denim model. He won’t do shirtless photo shoots, his publicist once told Bucky over drinks, annoyed. Bucky has the guilty feeling that this is for his sake, although they’ve never talked about it.)

Steve squirms around beneath him, breathing hard and struggling to hold himself still, while a stream of filthy pleas falls from his mouth. “God, Buck, please—want you to fuck me—oh, yeah, yeah, like that—”

Bucky seals his lips and circles his tongue hard around the head of Steve’s cock, making him groan and huff. His strategy for blow jobs is to keep his hair swept to one side, head tilted, as he does it, so the longer hair doesn’t get in the way. Bucky also, mouth still wrapped around Steve, lifts himself up a little using leverage from the hand on Steve’s hip, and slides his other hand up Steve’s chest and over his neck until he finds Steve’s lips with his fingertips. Steve sucks a couple fingers into his mouth obligingly and more bites them than licks them. Bucky glances up to watch Steve’s hands twisting in the sheets.

Steve lets Bucky go down on him for another minute and then grabs the wrist of the hand that’s pressed in his mouth and tugs it down to his chest, where he holds it in place with both of his hands. “Okay, okay, _please_ , Bucky—”

Bucky pulls off of him and wipes his wet mouth off against Steve’s thigh, making Steve laugh a little. “All right, all right, you know you could just let me blow you sometimes,” he says, smiling up at Steve. He gets a hand under Steve’s thigh and pulls up, so Steve’s leg bends at the knee and Bucky can hug it over his shoulder as he stays put between Steve’s legs.

“I guess,” Steve agrees, and gropes over to the toiletry bag on the nightstand. “Do _you_ want a blow job right now?”

Bucky takes the bottle of lube Steve holds out to him. “Are you kidding,” he grins at Steve, “I want to fuck you so hard you feel it while you’re sitting on Ellen’s couch tomorrow.”

“I’m telling her you said that about her couch,” Steve says.

“Go ahead, she doesn’t know who I am,” Bucky laughs.

“She does so,” Steve says, and then sighs “Oh,” while Bucky slides his first finger into him. “She—” he visibly controls his breathing, while Bucky watches, “She asks about you every time I’m on.”

“No she doesn’t,” Bucky says, stilling his fingers, thinking back. He’s pretty sure Steve’s only been on _The Ellen DeGeneres Show_ twice and he’s watched both of those times. They’d played a video of tiny eight-year-old Steve completely failing to catch a fly ball on his little league team, but they had definitely not discussed Bucky.

“Backstage—Bucky—come on—I’ll tell you every word Ellen ever said to me after, okay?”

Bucky shrugs and bites lightly at Steve’s thigh in apology, sliding another finger into Steve and focusing his attention there. Steve was always able to carry on clever conversations during sex without getting sidetracked, but Bucky couldn’t do it. It was one or the other. He never got tired of listening to the things Steve said about sex while they were having it, though—and Steve picks right up again with a chorus of _yeses_ and _mores_ once they stop talking.

He spends a while opening Steve up, focusing on the sounds he makes and thinking that he’s glad Steve wanted this, because this visit is important to him and it would be easy and unsatisfying to blow Steve and then fall asleep next to him. “Ready?” he asks Steve eventually, and Steve pulls him up to crush their mouths together. Steve’s reaching for the nightstand again, and Bucky’s already impatient, pressing his own hard and untouched cock near Steve’s. The tear of a condom wrapper as Steve opens it deftly with his teeth and the sobering feel of the condom as Bucky rolls it on, something serious and final about it, Steve touching him quickly and efficiently with more lube—and then—he lines himself up, Steve’s legs bent and wrapped around Bucky’s waist, and presses in—and finally they’re still. Both of them breathing hard, Steve biting his lip in a way that actually looks painful. Bucky watches him until he can’t keep his eyes from fluttering closed. He pulls out slowly, only a little, and then pushes in again. “Oh my god,” Steve says finally, panting, eyes squeezed shut, “just—go ahead—I’m gonna come in about two seconds but it doesn’t matter.”

His cock is straining against his stomach so Bucky believes this is probably true. He leans down and kisses him, then holds Steve’s sweet face between his hands. “Whatever you want to do. I don’t care, I could stay here all day.” He might die, but he could.

“Want to feel you,” Steve breathes, no hesitation, and shifts up against him like he can’t help it. “Go on, let me, please—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay—” Bucky shifts out and in again and angles himself the way he wants, then he rocks his hips against Steve. Steve is uncharacteristically quiet through it, using his legs to pull Bucky in and in and tangling his hands in Bucky’s hair. Finally he makes one little desperate sound, clenches his hands in Bucky’s hair and his legs around his waist, and comes.

Bucky fucks him through it, and after, when Steve is clutching Bucky to him and urging him on, it’s easy to follow only a minute after Steve, gasping against his neck.

 

+

 

He kisses Steve—who makes an “mm” sound—rolls off and throws out the condom, and goes to the suite bathroom to clean himself off. Steve wanders in a second later, looking wrecked and dripping with come so that Bucky has to gaze at him fondly and clean off his chest gently. When they’re as clean as they’re going to get without making any real effort, and after they’ve both peed and drank several bottles of expensive hotel water, they slip under the covers by mutual unspoken agreement and hold each other fiercely, like children. The sun is high and bright outside, but Steve’s pulled the blackout curtains closed and it’s dark in the hotel room, totally separate from the rest of the world.

“We should talk,” Bucky says. His forehead is tilted into Steve’s where they’re laying facing one another, curved in like a pair of parentheses around their clasped hands. Bucky is exhausted from the lack of sleep and the worry, his body relaxed somewhat by the sex but his thoughts still running, anxious. He isn’t sure if things are better or worse right now than they were an hour ago. “So, I don’t know, are we... good? Better, at least?”

The silence between them is terrible. Steve’s eyes are closed, Bucky can see when he shifts back slightly on the pillow to look. Not like he’s asleep, just like he doesn’t want to look.

“Bucky,” Steve says eventually, his voice thick with emotion. He opens his eyes and meets Bucky’s.

The thought hits Bucky cold and quick: what if Steve didn’t ask him here to patch things up?

But it doesn’t ring true. Steve looks distraught, unhappy and helpless, just like Bucky feels. And the other thought slots into place: what if Bucky didn’t come here to patch things up?

The dumb thing is, he doesn’t even know. He’d never had a clear picture of exactly how he’d wanted this trip to go. He’d just known that for his own sake, for his band’s sake, and for Steve’s sake, too, he needed to quit fighting with Steve at every turn, and that, since they loved each other, surely they would be able to figure out a way to do that.

Steve pulls Bucky practically on top of him, one of Bucky’s knees thrown across his hips and Steve’s arm around his shoulders. Bucky presses his face into Steve’s chest and feels suddenly like crying. “ _Stevie_ ,” he says, but he can’t get any more words out because he really might cry.

Something he didn’t agree to is happening. The air between them has changed.

“I know,” Steve says, incongruously, and pulls them somehow even closer together, the covers even higher up over them.

It occurs to him to Steve never asked him about the album. If he’d listened to it. Like he’d known that Bucky hadn’t. Or like it didn’t matter. Bucky is suddenly painfully sorry that he didn’t, as though it would’ve made a difference.

There’s an awful, awful feeling in Bucky’s stomach, and Steve’s hands have never clutched at him like this once in nine years, but somehow they fall asleep anyway. He thinks it’s a kind of gift they are forcing on themselves.

 

+

 

It’s evening when they wake up and neither of them have eaten since yesterday. Bucky rolls off of Steve (they’ve barely moved), finds his hand under the covers to grab, and looks at him. Steve’s face is only about a foot away from his, eyes blue and familiar and looking straight into Bucky’s.

It’s a look he’s known since he was sixteen years old. Steve was the first person that ever really knew him, all the way through, and he’s not the only one anymore, but he still knows Bucky the best.

“Let’s get dressed,” Steve says, so Bucky lets go of his hand and they do.

At some point, Steve flicks the suite lights on. Both of them are wearing basically the same thing as yesterday, new underwear and t-shirts. Bucky sinks into one of the armchairs and laces up his boots. It’s illogically hard; his hands feel huge and clumsy and he has to stop after a minute and tell himself to breathe. Steve is turned into the closet, guiltily not looking Bucky’s way.

So this is it, then. The unthinkable thing.

Bucky has the sudden urge to try to explain himself. “It was,” Bucky says, and shakes his head at himself. He watches Steve’s arm pause where he’s sorting through his hung clothes. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Steve turns, looking miserable and desperate. “It wasn’t _your_ fault.”

But of course it was. Steve taught Bucky how to play guitar, introduced his friends to Bucky, started that first band. Bucky did it because Steve wanted to, because Steve was his favorite thing in the world. He was, all that time, following Steve. He only went to that college because Steve wanted to.

An agreement they made accidentally, in the first days of their friendship, maybe even the first time they ever met: Bucky would go where Steve went. It was what kept them arranged next to each other, like birds in formation. You could still be a team, but you had to have a plan. Bucky’s the one who betrayed that, and things haven’t worked between them since he left in the back of Clint’s van five years ago. No matter how many times he and Steve came together again after that first time they were apart, it was never the same.

Did Bucky know at the time? Truthfully, he’d always figured that if it was going to be that bad, Steve wouldn’t have let him go like he did.

“Did you... know?” Bucky asks, helpless not to.

Steve comes and sits on the low coffee table, right in front of Bucky.

“When I joined the band, did you know?”

Steve shrugs. “I always, Bucky, even when we were in high school, I knew that out of the two of us, you were the talented one. I knew that if things went right for you, one day I’d be on my own again.”

“ _Stevie_ ,” Bucky says, and he can feel his face crumple as the tears fall.

Steve takes Bucky’s hand and presses the palm of it against his own cheek. “I don’t want to stop you from doing what you love anymore.”

“You didn’t,” Bucky insists. “I mean, obviously, I didn’t stop.”

“I know, but didn’t you always feel divided?”

Bucky looks down at their knees, close together but not touching. He wants to tell Steve so many things, how much he loves him, how somehow even though he knows he has to fly back to Berlin tomorrow to make the next show, Steve is still more important to him than any band has ever been. But he also knows he doesn’t get to say any of that.

There are labels and contracts and bandmates and tour schedules, and once Bucky knows this is how it has to be, it becomes hard to imagine how he let himself not realize it for so long. So many guilty sleepless night, all the missed phone calls, god, the girls he’s slept with to give himself something to do, the things he’s accused Steve of doing on purpose when he knew it was only ever the best either of them could manage—

He says, “I never wanted to do it without you.”

Steve moves Bucky’s hand to hold it in his lap between both of his own. “Me, either. But I want you to have—” He shakes his head. “Whatever. Everything you want, you know? I love you so much.”

Bucky grips Steve’s hands convulsively. “I love you so much,” he agrees, and can’t help smiling at him.

“Is it—?” Steve asks, and cuts himself off when his mouth twists to the side. Bucky hasn’t seen him cry since he fell on his bike and twisted his knee apart under it when they were fourteen, but tears stream down his face now.

“Yeah,” Bucky has to tell him. “I think this is the end of the line.”

After a minute, Steve takes his hands back gently and pulls the sleeve of his shirt across his face. He stands and crosses to the bathroom, where he runs the water in the sink out of view of where Bucky’s sitting, but doesn’t close the door.

Bucky finishes lacing up his boots. He never unpacked, so there’s nothing really to do but shrug into his discarded leather jacket. He takes back the stupid _Us Weekly_ and shoves it into a pocket on his bag—he’ll throw it away outside somewhere, but he doesn’t want Steve to have to look at it and think about that. He feels freshly guilty for being petty enough to bring it, but it’s—it’s not okay really, but at least they don’t have to be mad at each other anymore, now.

Steve comes out of the bathroom, face scrubbed clean and dry. “Look, I—” he shuffles and crosses his arms and doesn’t seem to think it’s a good idea to get much closer than he is. “I mean, you know if you need anything.”

“I know,” Bucky says around the now-permanent lump in his throat. “You too. Steve, it’s better. We just weren’t good as boyfriends, I don’t think.”

“No,” Steve agrees, his face complicated and closed. “Not boyfriends.”

They look bravely at each other and Bucky knows they’re both acknowledging the things they secretly wanted and knew better than to talk about: rings, adopted little girls. Maybe if they had talked about them—but it doesn’t matter.

“Okay,” Bucky says, and hefts his bag. Steve walks him to the door and sniffles slightly, and they both know they can’t hug each other. Because even now all Bucky really wants is for Steve to comfort him. So he grips Steve’s forearm, once, pointlessly, and then turns down the hall and walks away without looking back. He hears the door close behind him. He expects to cry in the elevator but it doesn’t come.

He spots Pepper and Tony across the lobby, dressed for dinner, pushing through the glass doors and leaving out into the night, Tony’s hand on the small of her back. Bucky hangs back in front of the elevators until he’s sure he won’t run into them out front.

In the cab on the way back to the airport, like twelve hours after he made the opposite trip, Bucky thinks: Steve never told him what Ellen said about him, and now he never will. At least he’ll get to watch the clip of Steve on her show tomorrow. He always seems happy there.

Bucky wants to call Steve up and demand that he answer all his questions: _Did I make you as happy as you made me? Did I give you everything you now love on a silver platter, like you did for me? Was I as big a part of your story as you were of mine? Please say I was._

 

+


	2. Chapter 2

+

 

In the airport, he has like fourteen hours to kill because there’s no earlier flight with an available seat than the one he was scheduled to take anyway. He doesn’t spare a thought to venturing back out into the city. He calls Natasha and tells her what happened and is surprised when she cries. Just quietly, but she doesn’t try to hide the sound of it in her voice as she asks him, “So you’re on your way back?”

“Yeah. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“See you when you get here,” she says and hangs up. He loves her and Clint so fiercely right then that it makes him dizzy and surprised.

 

+

 

The album does well. He, Clint, and Natasha are giddy with it even before it comes out. There’s a magic to those recording sessions that Bucky has never experienced before: he’s abnormally productive; he writes new and intricate guitar parts nonstop and can feel that they’re right when he plays them, fresh, for Natasha and Clint (who are similarly inspired—Bucky didn’t know them when they wrote their first album with their previous guitarist, but as far as he’s seen they are at the peak of their creative output, just like him). The songs land with a satisfying heaviness, un-flashy, complete objects, and yet the album comes out more accessible, more melodic, than any of their earlier work.

Circuit Theory’s effort, _SHIELD_ , outsells them by a wide margin, but that was to be expected. Incidentally, Bucky does eventually listen to Circuit Theory’s new songs. A few of them are unavoidable, playing in taxicabs and on FOX comedies, Steve’s voice everywhere he turns, and he eventually buys the CD one day when he finds himself killing time in a record store. It’s funny, because at some point he also goes back to those songs that Steve emailed him, once he remembers they’re on his phone, but they seem to all be early versions that got scrapped before the release. The songs that made it on the record are better, a little more mature and pared down.

Despite appearances, Bucky was never much of a music snob. Especially when it came to Steve’s band: he could see how happy their songs always made people, fans singing along at concerts and covering them with their friends on YouTube. And yet if he’s honest: this is the first time he’s admired Circuit Theory’s stuff. If he’s a dick for not appreciating it before, well, at least he doesn’t tell Steve about it, because he certainly would’ve if they’d been hanging out.

And they’re definitely not hanging out. Bucky is terrified to see Steve for a hundred reasons, which are mostly selfish and mostly come down to: what if he’s still in love, and Steve isn’t.

 

+

 

Three years pass, since the hotel room.

They don’t talk once in three years.

Bucky tried to avoid LA for awhile, but eventually Clint said he probably couldn’t permanently ditch both Hollywood and New York if any of them ever wanted to be on TV again. “Not New York,” Bucky protested, “just Brooklyn.”

“You know your family lives in Brooklyn, right?” Clint asked.

“If they love me, they’ll visit me in Manhattan,” Bucky answered, and has, in fact, been so scared of running into Steve that he hasn’t set foot in the borough except to play the odd concert. And then everyone felt so bad about it that they actually stopped scheduling dates in Brooklyn, which, the message boards were not happy with them, but they were riding high off the good press about the new album and it didn’t come off as too suspicious, just a little douchey.

He eventually buys his apartment on the Lower East Side. It’s near Clint and Natasha’s place, and he doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to convincing them to relocate to the West Coast (“I would sooner live in Canada,” from Natasha), so fuck it. It’s far enough from his old street in Brooklyn.

His self-imposed media blackout from anything potentially related to Steve is startlingly effective, and easy to stick to. He throws out the Arts section of the _Times_ ; doesn’t watch TV except for Netflix; and works almost constantly. It requires very little effort, because he is still roundly terrified to hear anything about Steve. His family is good about telling him nothing, and while he senses that they still see the Rogers family occasionally, they don’t seem to be as close with them as they once were.

It’s October and he’s in London, near the end of Assassin’s tour, and his sister tries to tell him something over the phone: “Hey, so, there’s something about Steve.” She says it casually, but she’s not a very good actress.

“Look,” he tells her from a cab, a chilly fall rain sheeting across the windows, “I know it probably seems like whatever it is, it’ll be better coming from you, but it won’t be. It’ll be better if I don’t know it at all.”

He must sound pretty bad, because she drops it. The thing he assumes and is desperate not to find out is that Steve could be marrying Sharon. He knows they dated, after Bucky and him called it quits. (It was at a party, which has turned out to be the most difficult time to avoid news of Steve. People who don’t know much about Bucky know that he used to be close to Steve, and will sometimes try to bring up the subject with him. In this case, a girl who didn’t seem aware that he and Steve had actually dated asked him, “Do you know if it’s true about him and Sharon Carter? Is he really taken?”)

A few days later, sliding out of a New York cab, home to his apartment after a month on the road, he has successfully pushed the conversation with his sister out of his mind. His street is mostly quiet, early as it is, but there’s an industrious moving company on the opposite sidewalk unloading furniture into the building across from his and the woman with the ridiculous standard poodle from next door is just setting off on her walk.

He sleeps until mid-afternoon, wakes up and doesn’t know where he is for several seconds, the white walls taking on an abstract quality. He’s still in the London hotel room, striped wallpaper, the bathroom is down the hall. No, he’s in his parents’ apartment, his sister through the wall, the linen closet just through that door. No, it’s the last apartment he shared with Steve, the sunny loft—and that’s what wakes him up. No Steve, no loft, he knows where he is. He’s home. Whatever slippery dream he’s just left drifts farther away.

There’s no food in his place because he’s been traveling, so he pulls on a jacket and takes the stairs down, mildly surprised to find himself looking forward to the New York autumn day. (It’s not that he’s not happy, because that isn’t exactly right. He’s focused and his work is fulfilling, and he loves his friends and looks forward to all kinds of things. But certainly, yes, there is a space inside him that used to be filled with something, and now there is nothing there, and he has realized that there might not be anything there again.) He pulls the building’s heavy door shut behind him.

And when he looks out across the street, by whatever stupid chance, he catches his movements mirrored in the man across the street, exiting his own apartment building. There are two lanes of traffic, two of parked cars, and a pair of sidewalks between them, but Bucky feels the breath Steve takes like he feels his own. Steve raises his hand in greeting. For a long moment Bucky doesn’t respond, but when Steve starts to turn like if Bucky wants to blank him he’s going to let him, Bucky calls out, “Hey,” and starts to pick his way across the road. He jogs across in the spaces between cars and meets Steve on his side.

Up close, Steve is a mirage. He’s a punch in the gut. He’s as lovely as Bucky has been afraid of all this time: cheeks lightly red, lips worried into a subtle pout, shoulders broad as a cornfield. There are reusable grocery bags tucked under his arm. He’s changed his hair a little, grown it some. (Bucky’s is long enough now that it’s pulled back in a bun at the crown of his head. He is aware of Steve noticing this and feels—some way about that.) Bucky isn’t sure if he seems slightly sad or if that’s something Bucky is projecting onto all the unfamiliar pieces of him. Steve shoves his hands into his pockets and makes himself look smaller, an old habit. “Hi,” he says, careful, like he’s not sure what Bucky’s going to do.

Bucky isn’t sure either, but he nods back and smiles in acknowledgement that this is ridiculous. “Hey,” Bucky says again. His eyes skip to the building Steve just left. “What are you... up to?”

Steve seems to know instinctively that he should be apologetic, even if he’s not sure why. “I, um, just moved in.”

“No shit.” He’s got to be joking. Bucky feels like he’s fidgeting a lot, bouncing on the balls of his feet, hands forced into pockets on his jeans that are too small for them, and wills himself to chill. He’s pleased at how even his voice sounds. “When?”

“I closed a couple weeks ago, brought the last of my stuff earlier today, actually.” Steve looks across the street, and tries to formulate a polite question.

Bucky takes pity on him. “Yeah, that’s me over there. Since... spring, I guess? We’ve been on tour though, it was summer the last time I was here.”

Steve winces. “It’s funny,” he says, “I didn’t think you’d ever live anywhere but Brooklyn.”

“Me either. Didn’t think you would, either.” Is it possible that Bucky moved here to avoid Steve and Steve moved out of Brooklyn to let Bucky have Brooklyn? “Tell you the truth, I haven’t even been there for the, well, for awhile.”

“Because of,” Steve says, and the look he gives Bucky is so significant, the sentence isn’t incomplete.

Bucky raises his eyebrows and nods.

“You really live right there,” Steve says.

Bucky shrugs. “You really live here?”

Steve runs a hand through his hair, radiating discomfort at a high pitch. “Look, I’m not, um. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, pal, I got that,” Bucky assures him, his voice kind, because he knows that. The thought never even seriously crossed his mind, that Steve could’ve followed him here. The circumstance is so dumb, so improbable, it could only be chance.

Steve looks mollified. Less like he’s going to run, at least.

“Look, I’ve been—I’m glad to see you,” Bucky says. (He must sound fond, because Steve smiles at him, unchecked and sweet, and looks away halfway through it like he doesn’t want to startle Bucky with the full force of his happiness.) “But, I guess I need to get it out of the way: did you move here with someone?” Steve certainly didn’t phrase it like he had, but Bucky figures it’s possible he did that for Bucky’s sake, to not be rude about it.

Steve’s eyes go comically wide for a second. “Oh, um, no? I don’t live with anyone. I’m not seeing anyone.”

“No shit,” Bucky says again, dumbly. Something shoots through him: a crackling hopeful feeling, warm and new. It occurs to him to point out that he isn’t seeing anyone either, but he’s wary of implying that Steve is interested in his romantic life when he might not be. And indeed Steve doesn’t bring it up.

“I was going grocery shopping,” Steve offers. “You?”

“Dinner, Chinese, maybe? Not sure yet.” Bucky needs to buy groceries but he’s ninety percent sure Steve’s about to ask him to hang out and he can’t play house with Steve by grocery shopping with him before he figures out what the score is between them.

Steve nods at him, so earnest, and Bucky knows he has to ask Steve to join him. It’s obviously rude not to. He also really, really wants to, but that’s never been a great barometer of what he should do. He’s missed Steve terribly, but he’s also been scared of this moment. He chews on his lip for a minute and says, “So, what do you think? Dinner, catch up? It’s been—a long time.” He tries to smile but he’s sure he looks as nervous as he feels.

“Bucky.” The sound of his name in Steve’s mouth is a shock, how familiar the shape of it is when Steve says it. How many times Bucky has heard it and all the various contexts. There are a lot of things that Bucky has pushed pretty far aside for a long time. “We could pretend this didn’t happen,” Steve says. “Go separate ways down the street.” His eyes are the same clear blue they always were, lovely and kind.

A loose strand of hair falls across Bucky’s face as he looks down. He tucks it behind his ear. “Is that what you want?”

“No.” Steve sounds steady and sure, and maybe a little older than when Bucky last saw him.

Bucky smiles at him, feels it crinkle his eyes. “Okay, so let’s get some dinner then.”

 

+

 

Here’s when he knows he’s sunk.

They’re walking out of the restaurant with Chinese takeout (eating in a restaurant is too fraught, formal and date-like, and it doesn’t occur to Bucky that going home is going to be too intimate, until later when it is). Steve holds the door open for him and moves back to let Bucky through. The space is tight and Bucky has to squeeze past him, so close that the scent of Steve’s skin and clothes and the cold air clinging to him is unavoidable. Bucky is overwhelmed with the urge to hug Steve and bury his face in his neck. It is an animal thing, the emotions this yanks out of a dark part of Bucky’s insides. Steve smells like: warmth, the wind, a bed, laundry detergent, sex. Not like sweat or semen, just—there was always a certain way that he smelled, just him, his skin and hair and mouth, if you had your nose pressed close enough to him. And Bucky hasn’t thought of it in a long time, because you couldn’t. It was too specific. You couldn’t call it to mind by force of will or recreate it. But here it is, and so now he has no choice but to know that if he has sex with Steve he’ll smell the same way he used to.

 

+

 

They’re at Bucky’s because it’s nominally more furnished than Steve’s, eating at the cozy, small kitchen table in front of the big windows. It’s the best spot in the apartment. Bucky likes this apartment, it’s the kind of place he always imagined himself in when he was younger and poorer and dreaming about making music that people would hear. But the place is a little stuffy from lack of use, in a way he didn’t notice when he was here alone earlier. The windows haven’t been opened in a month; there are no plants because he’s not home enough to keep them alive.

But they’re sitting across from each other, and if they scooted all the way forward in their chairs their knees would touch under the table, and there are emptied plates and half-full takeout containers and beer bottles arranged merrily between them, and the apartment feels nice right now. It feels fine.

“But what about Nat and Clint?” Bucky asks Steve. While the sun goes down outside and the apartment gets darker and darker because no one’s got up to turn on the lights, they’re filling in the missing details of each other’s lives. “You didn’t know they live two blocks away? They’ve been in that place for awhile.”

Steve shrugs. “Honestly? You’ve gotta know that neither of them really talk to me anymore.”

“I didn’t, though.” Bucky pushes back from the table and goes to the fridge to grab another beer. He holds up a bottle toward Steve, and opens two when he nods. “But I guess they tried not to bring that stuff up, to me, so I wouldn’t know.”

There is a small, uncertain silence. This is the closest they’ve got so far to talking about the breakup, or even mentioning their relationship. Steve downs the last of the beer he’s been working on and pulls the new one that Bucky places on the table for him toward himself. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “I kinda—got the idea you didn’t really want anything to do with me. My folks said that yours stopped hanging out with them, as much. I mean, they were nice about it and all, just, it seemed like they were busy, I guess—”

Bucky winces. “Sorry about that. It wasn’t, um. I didn’t ask them to do that. I think they just thought that I was...”

“Hurt,” Steve offers, uncomfortable.

“Not by you,” Bucky shrugs. “Just about the whole thing. I don’t know. It was more like, I wouldn’t let me parents or anyone talk to me about what they’d heard you were up to, because the only way I thought I’d be able to get through it is if I didn’t think about you.” He has to look away from Steve, alive and so close across the table, after he confesses this. It never gave him any joy to make Steve feel bad, although he used to end up doing it plenty of the time anyway.

Steve doesn’t seem surprised, at least. “That’s about the impression I got. So eventually I thought, it’s not fair to make you, um, avoid Brooklyn because you didn’t want to run into me. So I figured I’d… leave you to it. I didn’t realize you wouldn’t even hear I’d moved.”

They both have to smile a little. What are the fucking chances. (Something clicks into place: this is what his sister was going to tell him on the phone. Steve’s moving. And no one told Steve's famliy where Bucky was living out of a protective instinct that’s both sweet and annoying.)

“Oh,” Bucky says suddenly, glad for the chance to bring up something nice. “I never told you. I loved that album. _SHIELD_? I was pretty strict about you other than that, but I bought that album and I listened to it for a week straight.”

“Yeah?” Steve looks down, smiling and pleased. “You know after you and I split up, all I wanted to do was work. I drove Pepper crazy. We rerecorded all these songs we’d been basically done with, and that’s what went on that album. She was happy enough about it afterward. We all liked how it came out. But, thanks, it means a lot. I always—” He visibly stops himself.

Bucky can tell this is the edge of something. There is a familiar space opening up inside him and the desire to know everything about Steve returns with little fanfare, considering how long he’s been refusing it. “What?” Bucky asks him.

“I hate making anything I don’t show you.” Steve looks right at him, elbows on the table and hands toward Bucky, and says it like it’s obvious and simple. “I guess I always feel like, well what’s the point?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I know what you mean. In the back of my head, I’d finish a song and I’d think: I’ll show this to Steve later. Even though I didn’t know if I ever would.”

He knows Steve well enough to notice that he’s purposefully not reacting to that. And with a sudden, gutting clarity, it hits Bucky. This is it, this is all his worst fears, he’s still hurting Steve. He can’t, this can’t have all been for nothing.

“Sorry,” he says, first of all.

Steve kind of shakes his head and gives him a look, like, nah, come on. He’s Steve, after all, and if you need him to shoulder something, he’ll always do it.

“No, listen.” Bucky stands from his seat and comes around to sit next to Steve on his side of the table. Steve is a little wary, but he seems to feel the same pull that Bucky does: to make sure there is nothing bad between them. He turns his chair to Bucky. They could reach out and hold hands across their laps, if they wanted to. Bucky takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I was so… whatever I was, dramatic about it. I’m sorry it came off like I was so mad at you that I didn’t want anything to do with you. That isn’t how I felt. It must have sucked to think that I wanted to be, I don’t know, cut off from you. That’s so— I would never want that.”

Steve sizes him up, then his face gentles and he nods at Bucky. “So,” he says slowly, like he’s still trying to decide if it’s a good idea while he’s saying it, “why didn’t you ever call, Buck?”

Which is fair. Bucky shrugs, sits back in his chair and looks up at the streetlights through the window. “I thought about it plenty. It was a lot of things. At first I was scared I’d never be able to be on my own, but I guess I could. Then I was scared to find out if you’d moved on. I didn’t want to resent you if you had—I still don’t—but I was never all the way there. And if you were, whatever, getting married? I didn’t want to make it hard for you by being… I don’t know. And then, well. You didn’t call me either.” He smiles at Steve, apologetic that it’s all so dumb and true.

Steve shifts. “Yeah. That’s. I thought I was leaving you alone because you wanted to be left alone. I didn’t mean to… leave you alone.”

Bucky rolls his eyes fondly. “It’s nice that you didn’t get any less stupid in the past few years. Wouldn’t want to feel like I missed out on anything too important, and all that.”

Steve kicks at him a little, and then gets kind of serious. “I guess I should tell you, though. You know I was seeing someone for a long time, and it was kind of serious. Me and Sharon—”

 _I fucking knew it_ , Bucky thinks, without heat. And then, because he can see Steve seeing him think it, he says, “I fucking knew it,” and smiles at him.

Steve laughs. “Yeah, well. Anyway, we were… talking about getting married. We even went to look at rings. And then…”

Bucky watches the memories play across Steve’s face. He wants to hug him until he isn’t sad anymore. He even wants to have been there when whatever was happening with Sharon, because he’s supposed to be Steve’s friend and it just seems so stupid now, that he wouldn’t be able to put aside his own stuff to be there for him.

“And then,” Steve says, “I called it off. I loved her but I was still waiting for someone else. And she was—I don’t know what I would’ve done without her. And it wasn’t fair to her, that I wasn’t all the way there.” When he meets Bucky’s eyes there is something defiant in his look, like he knows he should maybe temper what he’s said but isn’t going to.

“You’re an idiot,” Bucky tells him, half stunned, a lump in his throat, and needing to say something.

“Yeah,” Steve says easily. “You’re a jerk.”

They’re leaning very close to each other now.

They were so young when they got together. Bucky wouldn’t trade any of it, but in a lot of ways it wasn’t ideal. Steve was so much a part of Bucky that it was hard to be logical about him. And he’s always felt a debt to Steve. He’s always felt he owed Steve his life, the way his life turned out. God knows what he’d be doing if he wasn’t playing guitar. And that’s all down to Steve. Being apart used to seem impossible, but the last three years prove that it isn’t impossible. It just isn’t what Bucky wants.

“I _missed_ you,” he says to Steve, finally, voice wavering with the force of it.

Steve slips forward to kneel between Bucky’s legs and hug him like he’s been waiting to do it this whole time. Bucky wraps him up in his arms. (He has been waiting to do it.) Steve is warm and solid in his embrace, body as improbably huge and gentle as Bucky remembers, which is good, because he was starting to think he must’ve been making some of Steve up. No one could be as good as Steve is, except Steve. He burrows his nose into the crook of Bucky’s neck, breathes him in, and says, “Me, too,” muffled against his shirt.

He pulls back just enough so they can look at each other, a hand on Bucky’s face and one on his ribs. “Is this what you want?” he asks Bucky. His eyes are moving fast, searching Bucky’s face. “Really, not just right now, because we’re here, but if someone asked you yesterday.”

“Yeah, pal.” A smile breaks across Bucky’s face and he presses his nose against Steve’s cheek. Still, he has to ask. “What about you? Not just because I want it, and not just because you didn’t want to marry someone else. You think it’s real?”

“Course it is,” Steve tells him, and Bucky believes it.

 

+

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @ okaynowkiss
> 
> "skinny jeans policy" is sort of a reference to the mighty boosh episode "the chokes," but what they really say in the episode is "a drainpipe policy." so i stole and americanized it.


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